Oswald Spengler:  Decline of the West

Volume 1: Form and Actuality

Alfred A. Knopf: 1926

Original German 1918

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Just how do you summarize a book like Volume 1 of The Decline of the West? It is, after all, only one half of the total. Yet that one half holds more than most whole works.

Holds what, you ask? Holds not only Spengler's philosophy, which today the reader should not even consider adopting for a personal view, but also a wealth of synthesized knowledge of western history and literature too voluminous for the non-monk to ever read through in a lifetime. We must, here, face facts; our modern (post-modern, post-processural, post-history, or any other pseudo-label you want to place on it) world does not allow a person of average or above intelligence the time and wherewithal to master the texts of history. This has been so for many years. Perhaps the ancients could, but only to their short view of history and the lack of written works made that so rather than their superior intellect. For as Spengler says
 

The fine pieces of Classical history-writing are invariable those which set forth matters within the political present of the writer, whereas for us it is the direct opposite, our historical masterpieces without exception being those which deal with a distant past (10).
 

Classical man, it seems, had no sense of historical time as do we and as did the Egyptians. Classical man, according to Spengler, burned the dead. We know of the Egyptian and the modern cult of embalming the dead.

We dwell on the introspective. As our society ages even more do we revel in the reading of autobiography and the journal. Spengler says,
 

No great Greek ever wrote down any recollections that would serve to fix a phase of experience for his inner eye (14).
 

You may have encountered Spengler before or perhaps you were warned off his works. After his thesis is the prediction of history,
 

The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our present ideals, but a single phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in essentials, calculate from available precedents (39).
 

With this, I disagree. Yet his didactic of Greece and Rome, Greece and Egypt, of Greece and us, informs me of finer points I did not glean in my limited classical reading and poses questions to which the answer is less important than the thought process thereby generated. Sometimes my disagreements with him verge on the emotional. Consider this
 

And I can only hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better they cold not do (41).
 

Perhaps Hitler read this and took it too much to heart. But in my disagreement I must think to counter his argument that is thrust forward at the intellectual level. A simple fight will not do; I must as few ever do, have alternative theories by which to explain the observed facts.
 

© 1997 by Ernest W. Seckinger Jr
April 7, 1997
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